Showing headlines posted by Scott_Ruecker

SugarCRM, one of the open source community's darlings, is taking steps towards improve interoperability between its PHP architecture and Java. The next version of SugarCRM's customer relationship management (CRM) suite, version 6.0 due in the fourth quarter of 2008 or first quarter of 2009, will feature a "Java layer" to enable PHP to talk to Java - hopefully without the tricky engineering work.

To save money, I cobbled together a computer for my mother out of cast-offs left over from my own upgrades. She doesn't need a cutting-edge computer because she's not a power user, but she does need a reliable machine to run a few basic applications and to access the Internet. I moved my mother from Windows to Ubuntu Linux, and the experience was a surprisingly smooth one.

The community surrounding Cinelerra, one of the premier non-linear video editors for Linux, has decided to strike off in its own direction and rewrite Cinelerra under a new codebase. Cinelerra has its roots in Broadcast 2000, a rewrite of Broadcast 2.1 in the late 1990s by its owner Heroine Virtual Ltd. (HV), a mysterious group that has stated its anonymity is necessary to keep the division between personal and professional projects. The Broadcast 2000 name was discontinued in September 2001, and Cinelerra 1.0.0 appeared in August 2002 using the same codebase.

Darkstar Linux 2008.1 is one of the first stable distro releases of the year. This distribution from Romania is based on Slackware and is available as a DVD image. For a desktop-oriented distro with its first release in 2004, Darkstar Linux has a lot of scope for improvement; its rock-solid performance and range of applications is overshadowed by its poor hardware skills

Dwayne Bailey tells us that Translate.org.za was awarded the coveted Pan South African Language Board award for its contribution to multilingualism and nation building over the past decade. The award, ‘Multilingualism and Nation Building: eBusiness Institution of the Decade’, was awarded to the non-profit organisation for its long-running and ground breaking work in the area of multilingual software.

SCO has filed its latest annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and it makes grim reading. The company warns that its shareholders could end with nothing because: "A plan of reorganization could result in holders of our stock receiving no distribution on account of their interests and cancellation of their existing stock." SCO is Chapter 11 - US bankruptcy protection.

December's release of Nmap 4.50 marked the popular port-scanning tool's tenth anniversary. The 4.50 release includes Zenmap, a cross-platform GUI front end for Nmap which includes a command creation wizard, a scripting engine, and a host of other improvements. Zenmap makes it easier than ever to use Nmap. Port scanners are security auditing tools that allow you to discover hosts and the ports they have open on your LAN or across the Internet.

Torvalds has been to Linux.conf.au and Torvalds has spoken. During a wide-ranging interview the Linux founder speculated on the future of hardware and the control that open source offers vendors. The ramifications of this are remarkable. Come hear the word of Torvalds.

Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, will announce on Feb. 6 that it's making Parallels Workstation for Linux available to users through the Ubuntu Partner Repository. Parallels, formerly SWSoft, the company behind the open-source virtualization program OpenVZ, is best known for its Parallels virtualization software that works with Mac OS X. Parallels Workstation for Linux won't let you run Mac OS X, but it will enable you to run multiple versions of Windows or Linux with Ubuntu.

Did you know Red Hat’s introducing online training? When we heard that, we went digging to find somebody that could tell us more. Joshua M. Hoffman, the Product Manager for Virtual Training / Live Access Labs, was willing to fill us in. So here’s the details on Linux training… from the comfort of your living room.

While the world is still recovering from the work on KDE 4.0.0, we are ready to announce the release of KDE 4.0.1, the first bug fix update of the KDE 4.0 desktop. KDE 4.0.1 contains numerous bugfixes such as stability improvements, performance improvements and, as in every point release, updated translations for most components. Lots of work has been put into shared components making the life of most applications easier. Particularly striking is also the high number of bugfixes in KHTML.

A community driven project for Ruby source code to run natively on Microsoft's .NET framework has shut down, faced by progress from an official Microsoft effort. Rather than repeat the work on Microsoft's own IronRuby, Ruby.NET is closing its doors just three months after its latest milestone release, and following an initial wave of developer buzz,.

The Elive Linux distribution combines beauty with ease of use. Elive is based on Debian and uses Enlightenment as its windows manager, which gives the distribution a Mac OS X look and feel. Elive comes with dozens of easy-to-use desktop applications that just work. Elive started as a live CD, but now at version 1.0 it works well as a standard hard drive installation. The latest unstable ISO, 1.5, should be released shortly.

RTTS tests and monitors mission-critical applications to help companies prevent failures that could shut down operations. To do that, it combines open source tools with its own custom-developed interface and offers a software-as-a-service solution that proves the adage "necessity is the mother of invention." Bill Hayduk, founder and CEO of RTTS, says of open source software, "In the late '90s, a lot of the stuff out there was kind of clunky and not mature." By the turn of the century, though, "as it became more mature and adaptable, we started adopting a significant amount of it.

It was recently pointed out that most of the x86 architecture patches had been merged into the mainline 2.6.25 kernel, except for the kgdb patches. Linus Torvalds replied, "I won't even consider pulling it unless it's offered as a separate tree, not mixed up with other things. At that point I can give a look."

In the past we have examined OggConvert and Thoggen, two GUI tools for simple encoding or transcoding video into free Ogg formats. But if you are interested in codecs other than Theora and Dirac, you have a lot more options to choose from. Let's consider two utilities that advertise both ease-of-use and quality: RippedWire targets DVD ripping and conversion specifically, and WinFF, which can convert DVD content and other video sources.

February 11th, 2008 will see the Florida Linux Show (www.floridalinuxshow.com), a one-day event aimed at business people and systems administrators who are trying to learn about the latest in Free and Open Source trends. The event will be held at the University of North Florida, University Center at Jacksonville, and the admission charge is ten dollars.

Terra Soft today released Yellow Dog Linux v6.0 for Sony PS3, Apple G4/G5, and IBM System p. Built upon the CentOS foundation, a popular derivative of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), YDL v6.0 offers enterprise quality for the home user. .

The atool package is a collection of Perl scripts that allows you to handle many different archive formats and compression schemes using a single command-line interface. Atool uses other tools behind the scenes to perform the heavy lifting. With atool, you can handle any archive without having to remember what command-line tool to use to expand it and which options that particular tool expects.

The LiMo Foundation has announced the first release of its mobile Linux platform. The foundation is one of several industry consortia seeking to create a standardized approach to Linux-based handsets. Its main rival at the moment is the Linux Phone Standards Forum, which is focused on creating shared, open specifications. The members of LiMo, by contrast, have taken the approach of creating a shared, open platform upon which they can build proprietary applications. The Lips Forum released its first set of specifications in December of last year.